PAFOA: Past, Present & Future - Now with Question & Answer Time

[danp]

My question to you is this: What specific, articulable, measurable steps need to be taken to get PAFOA to that point that you discussed in post 11, and what is your plan to accomplish those steps?

For now I believe it will be important for PAFOA to begin learning how to build out a volunteer work force (like our recent call to get volunteer bloggers) and see how that goes.

As I am successful at integrating small groups of people into the official operations of the organization it will provide more basis to continually make those groups larger and larger until ultimately PAFOA may in fact be a true membership organization.

[danp]

As a professional biologist and lifetime student of evolution, there's one lesson that I've learned. That is that "over-ornamentation leads to extinction." ... Which leads me to believe that much of the strength that is present within the membership of PAFOA lies in the "free form" affiliation of the members.

I wanted to address this point because I think it also touches on what I think other members may have concerns about as well.

When I say that I see PAFOA growing into a more organized entity, I do not by any measure mean to insinuate that it will come at the cost of the great free-form, grass-roots base that has grown organically out of this forum and been wildly successful at getting stuff done.

If anything what I envision is more a way for the organization to support such grass-roots action where necessary and supplement it with an "official" presence where it would be helpful.

Examples of this would be:

1. Providing formal analysis of hot issues, points and counter points to assist gun owners involved in grass-roots action when talking to legislators, city councils, etc.
2. Building organized knowledge bases of information such as points of contacts at newspapers if someone wants to submit an op-ed.

The intent here is to take what we have and make it more efficient. In my opinion the stuff everyone here has done is nothing short of amazing, my hope is that we can make it something so jaw-dropping that gun owners from around the country look to it as a model.

[danp]

If and when PAFOA morphs into a greater organization, how do you think the community will react?

Honestly, I have no idea. As I mentioned before the organization isn't really changing so much as it's just growing up. Every day it will evolve based on the world around it and every day members will have to see if they're buying what PAFOA is selling. I think it is impossible to know how people react because every person will react differently.

Obviously I'm biased, but I do believe that gun owners in Pennsylvania will overall react positively to where PAFOA is probably headed.

[danp]

So have you thought about a mechanism that we would be able to discuss and brainstorm changes and solutions to problems (I think we had some good ideas on how to tweak the rep [specifically the neg rep] system that may have made all parties happy) prior to final decisions being made?

I have not yet come up with anything formal so I can't make any promises, but my guess is that in the future when we're considering big changes we will open it up for a commentary where people can hash out the issue, then after people have made their points and read other people's points we can do a poll to gauge the general feelings of the membership.

I would guess that such a system would reduce tensions a bit, but I don't know. Only one way to find out! We'll have to test some systems when there are changes to talk about.

[danp]

Do you have any plans on maybe delegating more responsibility so that you can be a bit more active in discussions on the forum so that people can get a sense of who you are? It's really easy to dismiss pretty words that are only seen once in a great while. I don't doubt that you are working furiously, but out of sight our of mind unfortunately seems to be the case too often.

My participation on the day to day discussions on the forum has dropped off significantly the past few years for a few reasons:

1. Between my day job, the work I have to do for PAFOA, and my personal life, I just don't have time to post on the forum sadly. The problem is even if I delegated 100% of the work I do right now, all it would do is open the door for all of the work I have on my TODO list. As I've said before, I could work for PAFOA 80 hours a week and probably be busy for the rest of my life.
2. Fair or not, because of my position as the representative of the organization and as a (very minor) public figure because of it, I can't talk as freely as other people can. There are certain things I can't or shouldn't say on certain topics. This restriction sadly diminishes the value of my participation in some areas.
3. A lot of times I simply don't have anything to add. When the forum first started I had to sit on the forum and answer questions and talk to people because there was no one else to do it. At this point by the time I even read a thread 20 people (some of which are a heck of a lot more knowledgeable than me on the topic at hand) have already answered the question 3 times over.

Maybe as things get shaken up a bit from here on out I can turn this around a bit, I hope so.

If you think my posting is bad, would you know that I haven't had time to go to the range in almost a year? I think I fired a gun once in 2009.

[danp]

Post #24: You cite the mission statement, and note that the organization preserves the rights of firearm owners (Article 21, 2A). Are there issues related to this that you are not interested in pursuing, or that you see as outside of the mission?

As far as I am know there are no pro-gun issues that PAFOA will not take a stance on, the real question is what ones will it act on and how.

Every issue should be a a simple ROI calculation. If we have to choose between spending money to send everyone an email to call our state representatives about Castle Doctrine or to call our national representatives about a national issue, it's probably safe to say that we will get a greater ROI at the state level and should focus our energy there. A hundred phone calls to a US Senator is what you get before breakfast, 100 calls to a representative of a small, rural, PA district sets of alarms.

While that's not the greatest example (because we could easily do both) the general principle stands:

PAFOA should focus on battles it can win and leave other battles to other people. If we try to do too much at once and stretch ourselves to thin, we may very well end up with nothing. I'd rather build a history of ever growing successes that can be leveraged to fight larger and larger battles over time.

To me that's the only consideration that may cause PAFOA to not take certain actions in certain issues.

[danp]

At this point I've answered almost every question that has come into my mailbox. If your question was not answered it is most likely because it was very similar to another question I answered, or in 2 cases the answer would have required me to divulge information that I am not comfortable putting out on the Internet for the entire world (including our political opponents) to see.

If people have more questions you are always free to either PM me or email me at dpehrson@pafoa.org, however at this point unless I get a question I really think needs a good public answer, there will most likely not be further postings here.

Thank you for everyone who participated and I sincerely hope that this exercise and process worked for everyone, especially the members who were very concerned about getting answers to some tough questions.

I know from my perspective this process was infinitely more manageable than trying to keep up with an open thread. To be honest I actually really enjoyed doing this and think maybe we should do it again sometime in the future.